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Equation 13 · Part 2 · How Mechanistic Interpretability Research Is Actually Done

Symbol k

z=TopKk ⁣(Wenc(a−bdec)),z = \mathrm{TopK}_k\!\left(W_{\mathrm{enc}}(a - b_{\mathrm{dec}})\right),
kk

What this part means

k is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

Its job in the formula

k is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

The passage around this formula

…their combined magnitude is discouraged, and it systematically shrinks the elements that do fire toward zero, biasing the reconstruction. Two later refinements address this more directly. Gao and colleagues introduced k -sparse encoding, which drops the tunable penalty in favour of a fixed sparsity budget enforced structurally, z=TopKk ⁣(Wenc(a−bdec))z = \mathrm{TopK}_k\!\left(W_{\mathrm{enc}}(a - b_{\mathrm{dec}})\right). keeping only the k largest pre-activations and zeroing the rest, and used it to train a sixteen-million-latent dictionary on GPT-4 activations over forty billion…

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Learn the underlying idea

A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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